Search engine optimization or SEO is a complex process that has several different types. All types of SEO have the same objective: to optimize a website for greater visibility in search engines.

In this post, I will explain the different types of SEO and what SEO techniques are applied to each type.

What are the types of SEO?

Let’s start with a quick definition of what SEO is.

SEO is the process of making a website easier for search engines to understand and easier to use. The general objective of SEO is to increase the organic traffic of search engines, improving the positions where the site appears in SERPS for various search terms.

At the beginning (think of the beginning of 2000), SEO was simple, but over the years the entire SEO process became complex.

When optimizing a site for search engines, you should consider hundreds of rules to satisfy the various search engine ranking factors and, at the same time, keep your users happy.

To make it easier to handle, the SEO industry comes with different types of SEO. Each type is responsible for several SEO rules.

The important thing is to understand that these SEO subsets are not a different process, it is just a way to divide a complicated process into several smaller and easier to manage processes.

Therefore, the various types of SEO are:

1. Technical SEO
2. On-Page SEO
3. Content SEO
4. Off-Page SEO
5. Local SEO
6. Mobile SEO
7. eCommerce SEO

The most important are technical SEO, on-page SEO, and off-page SEO, as shown in the following diagram.

Technical SEO

Technical SEO is exactly what the name implies, that is, the technical parameters that affect the visibility of a website in search engines.

The main objective of technical SEO is to ensure that search engine crawlers can track and index a website without problems.

The most important technical SEO guidelines are:

• Verify and optimize your robots.txt file to ensure that search engines can access your site correctly.
• Add and verify your site with Google Search Console and specify your preferred domain.
• Use the COVERAGE report to find and correct crawl errors.
• Create an XML sitemap and submit it to all major search engines.
• Optimize the site structure and the URL structure.
• Follow SEO Friendly web design
• Create fast loading sites on computers and mobile devices.

On-Page SEO

On-Page SEO is about the page itself and how to make it more friendly for search engines and users.

Keep in mind that, although search engines analyze a site as a whole, the ranking is done at the page level.

That is why it is important to pay attention to the optimization of each page of your website.

The most important On-page SEO guidelines are:

• Optimize the titles of your page. This is a critical factor in SEO. The titles of the pages are displayed in the search results and should be interesting for users to click. The title page should also provide search engine robots with sufficient clues about the content of the page.

• Optimize your H1 tag. While the page title is displayed in SERPS, the H1 tag is displayed as the top header of a page. An optimized page has only one H1 tag and generally has the same values ​​as the page title.

• Optimize your headlines. In addition to the H1 tag, a page must have subtitles (H2, H3) for the different sections. In the case of long-format content, subtitles make it easy for users to read the page and search crawlers.

• SEO for images. All images used on a page must be correctly optimized, otherwise, search engines will not be able to understand what they represent. Things like optimizing the file name, file size, and ALT text are essential for image SEO.

• Page formatting. Publishing a page with text and images without wasting time to beautify the content is not a good SEO practice. Although Google cannot “see” a page as a human being, it has ways of understanding how a page looks or if it is full of ads and pop-ups, and this is taken into account during the ranking process.

Content SEO

Content SEO is a subset of SEO on the page. Content SEO has to do with the quality of the content and how to improve it.

Because it is a very important SEO success factor, many consider it one of the types of SEO. In many cases, you can find content guidelines under on-page SEO, which is also a correct approach.

Posting excellent content that users love and that search engines can understand is the winning combination.

To achieve this, you can follow these guidelines:

1. Start your content creation process with keyword research. Find the important SEO keywords for your site and incorporate them into your content.
2. Go ahead and search for long-tail keywords and semantically related keywords (or LSI) and add them to your titles, headline and main content.
3. Publish complete content and enough time for users to get what they want and search engines have enough clues to understand the context of their content.
4. Link to other high-quality sites (if that makes sense) and to other pages on your site to help users learn more about a topic.
5. Use structured data and schemas to identify important parts of your content for search engines.

Off-Page SEO

Off-page SEO has to do with promotion. While previous types of SEO focused more on the infrastructure and content of the website, off-page SEO has to do with the techniques you can use to promote your website on the Internet.

Popular sites are more likely to have a higher ranking on Google than less popular sites.

The most important off-page SEO methods are:

• Link building. Link building is the process of obtaining SEO backlinks from other sites. These backlinks act as “trusted votes” and increase the authority of the target site (as long as they do not have the nofollow attribute attached to the link).

Brand Promotion. Google likes to rank well-known brands with high scores on results because people trust them.

In addition to promoting your website to get backlinks, you should also promote your brand and encourage conversations about it on the various social networks and forums.

Google can capture these signals and reward the sites that people talk about.

Local SEO

Local SEO is a type of SEO only suitable for local businesses.

In other words, if you have a website and your goal is to get customers to visit your local store, optimize your website for local SEO.

Everything mentioned above is valid for local SEO, with the addition of the following guidelines:

Make sure you have the name, address and contact details of your company on each page of your website.

• Add the local business scheme to your home page
• Create a Google My Business account
• Register your business in reliable directories such as Yelp, Yahoo, small businesses, Foursquare, and others.
• Promote your site in local directories and sites (for example, local newspapers online).

Mobile SEO

Mobile SEO is not, in itself, a different type, but a subset of SEO specific to mobile devices.

It is a fact that now more than 60% of Google searches are performed on mobile devices.

That is a great deal and a good indication that the Internet is moving away from the traditional desktop and moving to mobile devices.

This is also the reason why Google decided to create a mobile index and start indexing the mobile version of a website, rather than the desktop version.

When working on mobile SEO, you must ensure that:

• Your website is compatible with mobile devices. Running the test for mobile devices is a good place to start.
• The website loads quickly on the cell phone.
• The site is easy to use on mobile devices.
• The mobile user experience is not affected by interstitial banners, other aggressive advertising methods or pop-up windows.

Ecommerce SEO

eCommerce is a big industry. When it comes to search engine optimization, optimizing an e-commerce site is more complex than working on a blog or corporate website.

It has many more pages to optimize and it is much harder to promote an e-commerce site.

The most important SEO factors for eCommerce are:

• The optimization of an online store starts with the homepage and category pages. These two types of pages must be optimized correctly before starting to work on the pages of your products.
• Optimize your product pages based on the results of your keyword research.
• Optimize ALL visual elements of your store (images, videos)
• Add the necessary designs (product, offers, etc.)
• Promote your store on social networks
• Think of creative ways to make people link to the pages of your products
• Start a blog and post content related to your products and how they can help people solve a problem.

What is Black Hat and White SEO?

Is Black hat SEO a type of SEO?

Some people believe that ‘black hat SEO’ is a type of SEO and this creates confusion for beginners.

Black hat SEO is just a term used to describe any action taken to deceive search engine algorithms.

From time to time, many people have ideas on how to link artificially to improve the ranking of a website on Google. These methods are contrary to Google’s guidelines and should be avoided.

The only result of following the black hat techniques is to lose your ranking and confidence in Google, be penalized by Google and decrease your chances of getting ratings on Google again.

All the methods described in the article are “White Hat SEO” techniques and, if you follow them correctly, you can get a high ranking in the search engines and get a share of the search engine traffic.

Conclusion

SEO is one of the most powerful digital marketing tools for any type of website. A website optimized for SEO enjoys high visibility in search engines and improves the user experience.

To facilitate handling, the SEO process is divided into several threads or types. The most important types are technical SEO, on-page SEO, and off-page SEO.